Treesearch

Utah sweetvetch has a broad distribution from ranging from Alaska, across most of Canada, and south through the western United States to Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. It is particularly common in the Rocky Mountains and other mountainous regions of the western United States (Hitchcock and Cronquist 2018; Ross 2020). Subspecies mackenzii occupies only the northern range of the species, occurring from Alaska across Canada and south to Washington and Oregon (Hitchcock and Cronquist 2018). Subspecies boreale occurs from British Columbia to Manitoba and south, mainly in the Rocky...

The Enchantments area within the Alpine Lakes Wilderness has long been a popular recreation area, which has led the Forest Service to adopt an overnight permit system and, more recently, to consider a day-use permit system to balance recreation, resource protection, and visitor safety. The Enchantments area includes high-use trails such as those off of Icicle Rd, including Stuart Lake, Eightmile, and Snow Lakes. Current challenges facing managers include ensuring visitor safety, and mitigating crowding and impacts to nature. Current management strategies involve education, infrastructure...

Rising visitation to the Cleveland National Forest (CNF) has led the Forest Service to adopt the 2022 San Diego River Watershed Visitor Use Management Plan to balance recreation, resource protection, and visitor safety. High-use sites such as Three Sisters Falls and Cedar Creek Falls are priorities due to their urban proximity, wildfire potential, limited parking, quantity of Search and Rescue efforts, and status as two of the only accessible waterfalls in the county. Challenges include safety, crowding, and ecological impacts. Current strategies involve education, infrastructure, permits,...

The particle number concentration (PNC) in a suspension is a key measurand in nanotechnology. A common approach for deriving PNC is to divide the total mass concentration by the per-particle mass, calculated as density times volume. The volume is most frequently derived from the arithmetic mean diameter (AMD) of the size distribution. The harmonic mean volume (HMV) has also been used. Given a known size distribution, we show that the correct PNC is obtained by using the arithmetic mean volume (AMV). The AMD-based volume results in an overestimate in PNC that increases superlinearly with...

Plantation forests in the southeastern United States are dominated by loblolly pine (Pinus taeda L.) whose wood is used to supply the lumber, composite, pellet, and pulp and paper industries; processing of this timber affords bark as a major byproduct. To date, information is limited regarding the variation of loblolly pine bark properties with relative tree height and how these trends vary with physiographic region. For this study, 139 stands across the natural range of loblolly pine were destructively sampled with three trees felled from each stand. Bark properties, specific gravity...

Drought often occurs when precipitation is lower than average growing season precipitation. Drought can vary spatially and temporally across the Northern Great Plains and lead to localized as well as widespread reductions in forage production. In South Dakota, because of its extensive grasslands, managers and producers rely on drought prediction tools that can forecast drought and be frequently updated as the growing season progresses. The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) developed the South Dakota Drought Tool (SDDT) to provide peak and monthly forage production estimates for...

The work environment for a wildland firefighter on an incident is both physically and mentally demanding, and for some requires a high level of caloric intake from quality food sources provided by meal catering services. The aim of this study is to explore wildland firefighter perceptions of meal catering during wildfire incidents. We conducted seven, in-depth one-hour interviews with wildland firefighters with over four decades of wildland fire experience, during the months of May through June 2024. Exploratory qualitative findings from seven interviews revealed the following themes:...

Outdoor recreational wood burning, such as fire pit use, can produce large amounts of smoke which contains fine particulate matter (PM) and other air pollutants. Recently, purported “smokeless”, or low-smoke, fire pits have become widely available. Motivated by the apparent public desire for low-smoke options and the prospect of reducing PM pollution, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, collaborated with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency to measure air pollutant emissions from low-smoke fire pits. We measured emission factors (EF) for PM (EFPM), carbon monoxide,...

During 2022–2024, the Wildfire Research (WiRē) Center partnered with the West Region Wildfire Council (WRWC) to learn more about parcel-level wildfire risk in Montrose County, Colorado. This research project was part of a larger, sustained collaboration between WiRē and WRWC, moving the focus from areas typically characterized as fire-prone due to heavily treed and steep topography, into an area with relatively gentle topography and lighter fuels. The study area borders and includes northern portions of Ouray County that fall within the service area of Montrose County Fire Protection...

The Fire Effects Information System is a publicly available, searchable website with over 1,400 comprehensive literature syntheses on fire-related topics. It is maintained by a team of ecologists, writers, and editors who pore through and synthesize thousands of publications on the biology, ecology, and fire ecology of species and ecosystems to produce evidence-based literature reviews that land managers can rely on for decision support. The team continuously writes and updates these reviews, making FEIS a dynamic resource.